The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice | Page 2

underground conspiracy of social
revolution. The public mind is confused. Something approaching to a
social panic appears. To some minds the demand for law and order
overwhelms all other thoughts. To others the fierce desire for social
justice obliterates all fear of a general catastrophe. They push nearer
and nearer to the brink of the abyss. The warning cry of "back" is
challenged by the eager shout of "forward!" The older methods of
social progress are abandoned as too slow. The older weapons of social
defense are thrown aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion is
powerless. It limps in the wake of the popular movement. The "state",
as we knew it, threatens to dissolve into labor unions, conventions,
boards of conciliation, and conferences. Society shaken to its base,
hurls itself into the industrial suicide of the general strike, refusing to
feed itself, denying its own wants.
This is a time such as there never was before. It represents a vast social
transformation in which there is at stake, and may be lost, all that has
been gained in the slow centuries of material progress and in which

there may be achieved some part of all that has been dreamed in the
age-long passion for social justice.
For the time being, the constituted governments of the world survive as
best they may and accomplish such things as they can, planless, or
planning at best only for the day. Sufficient, and more than sufficient,
for the day is the evil thereof.
Never then was there a moment in which there was greater need for
sane and serious thought. It is necessary to consider from the ground up
the social organization in which we live and the means whereby it may
be altered and expanded to meet the needs of the time to come. We
must do this or perish. If we do not mend the machine, there are forces
moving in the world that will break it. The blind Samson of labor will
seize upon the pillars of society and bring them down in a common
destruction.
* * * * *
Few persons can attain to adult life without being profoundly impressed
by the appalling inequalities of our human lot. Riches and poverty
jostle one another upon our streets. The tattered outcast dozes on his
bench while the chariot of the wealthy is drawn by. The palace is the
neighbor of the slum. We are, in modern life, so used to this that we no
longer see it.
Inequality begins from the very cradle. Some are born into an easy and
sheltered affluence. Others are the children of mean and sordid want.
For some the long toil of life begins in the very bloom time of
childhood and ends only when the broken and exhausted body sinks
into a penurious old age. For others life is but a foolish leisure with
mock activities and mimic avocations to mask its uselessness. And as
the circumstances vary so too does the native endowment of the body
and the mind. Some born in poverty rise to wealth. An inborn energy
and capacity bid defiance to the ill-will of fate. Others sink. The
careless hand lets fall the cradle gift of wealth.
Thus all about us is the moving and shifting spectacle of riches and

poverty, side by side, inextricable.
The human mind, lost in a maze of inequalities that it cannot explain
and evils that it cannot, singly, remedy, must adapt itself as best it can.
An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price at which we
live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal relief is the
mere drop that any one of us alone can cast into the vast ocean of
human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we too
perish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of our
lighted houses against the indigent and the hungry. What else can we
do? If we shelter one what is that? And if we try to shelter all, we are
ourselves shelterless.
But the contrast thus presented is one that has acquired a new meaning
in the age in which we live. The poverty of earlier days was the
outcome of the insufficiency of human labor to meet the primal needs
of human kind. It is not so now. We live in an age that is at best about a
century and a half old--the age of machinery and power. Our common
reading of history has obscured this fact. Its pages are filled with the
purple gowns of kings and the scarlet trappings of the warrior. Its
record is largely that of battles and sieges, of the brave adventure of
discovery and the vexed slaughter of the nations. It has long since
dismissed